ORANGE BEACH, Ala. – The Turtle Czar wants you!

Mike Reynolds, that is. Also known in these parts as the turtle czar, a moniker he picked up during the 2010 oil spill. It’s even printed on his business cards.

Reynolds is head of the advocacy group called Share the Beach and holds the state permit for handling loggerhead sea turtles.

The nesting season for the ancient amphibians begins around May 1 and the group needs volunteers. The first meeting of the season will be Thursday at 6 p.m. at the Adult Activity Center in Gulf Shores.

“It’s our volunteer signup meeting for the 2012 season,” Reynolds said. “We do this every year about this time, a couple of weeks from May. “I hold the federal permit for Alabama to handle sea turtles. Everybody in the program works under my permit. According to my permit specifications I need to train everybody each year to understand protocol in nesting and hatching activities.”

Its early morning duty, but the volunteers walk the beach every early dawn looking for signs of nesting activity. The area covered is from the Florida line to the western tip of Dauphin Island.

“We need to have people out there early in the morning before the vacationers hit the beach,” Reynolds said. “Our loggerheads nest in the middle of the night. At first light you can see their tracks. You have to look for the turtle tracks.”

Reynolds says the initial and most important part of that effort is finding tracks of sea turtles and tracing them to their nests.

“If we can’t find the crawl then we can’t find the nest,” he said. “The nest itself is camouflaged by the momma turtle. It’s hard to find. But the crawl is very distinct. That’s why it’s so important for us to find the crawl.

“If we find the crawl, we see if there’s a nest. And if we don’t find the nest, then we can’t protect it. What if it’s in a lighted area and we don’t know it’s there, then we’re going to lose that nest. We try to get everyone we can.”

Share the Beach grew out of an effort to keep the sea turtles hatchlings from heading inland toward light instead of to the water.

“Share the Beach came about because of the local citizens being concerned about why were there so many dead baby sea turtles in the road during the summer time, especially in July, August and September,” Reynolds said.

Reynolds says hatchlings instinctively head toward the light because for millions of years before humans lit up the coast the brightest lights were the moon and stars. The hatchlings would head toward the natural lights shining off the waves.

Volunteers are crucial to this effort, Reynolds said.

“Locals Is what we need, people that are 18 years of age or older and able to walk a couple of miles of beach early in the morning to make this work,” he said.

After the first meeting, volunteers are required to read an online manual about sea turtles and how to track and handle them. It can be found at alabamaseaturtles.com by clicking on the volunteering tab.

“Once you come and sign up then we will begin the training schedule and you need to come to a training meeting,” Reynolds said, “probably just one meeting for the initial training.

“You will have read the manual already, you’ll have training on the beach, we’ll show you what a crawl looks like and our general protocol as how to walk down the beach to look for sea turtle crawls.”

Rookies are welcome, Reynolds said, and will be assigned a beach as close to their home as possible.

“When the season starts, if you’re new and you’ve never done this, then you’ll be put with experienced volunteers,” he said. “You’d think you’d know exactly what a sea turtle crawl looks like, but there are situations, especially in high-traffic like along the public beach or access areas, turtles will nest sometimes in the middle of the most unlikely spots. Right where you would think they wouldn’t want to be in the middle of all this activity in the daytime.”

There are eight sections of beach each under the watch of a team leader with a total of about 350 volunteers. Patrols must be complete by 8 a.m. and if a nest is in an unsafe place it must be moved by 9 a.m.

“By the permit if I have to move a nest by 9 o’clock,” Reynolds said. “In the dynamics of egg development, there’s an attachment process. The yolk has to attach to the side of the egg so the new turtle can breathe. That’s the oxygen exchange. If you move the eggs a lot after that 9 o’clock hour you run the risk of killing the egg and perhaps the survival of the whole nest.”

The theme, Reynolds reiterated, is sharing the beach with these turtles that were here long before humans.

“And it’s up to us to learn that as humans,” he said. “That which we are enjoying, when it comes to the beach, it’s still a critical habitat for sea turtles. We have to protect this. The turtles don’t have a choice. They are driven by nature to come back to this beach to nest no matter what the conditions.”

Keeping it clean as well as squelching lighting is important to turtle survival, Reynolds said.

“If they bump into your chair it perturbs them,” he said. “If they get caught under your chair or your umbrella they’ll get perturbed and just go back in the water and dump their eggs.

“If there’s too much light shining on the beach they’ll just go back out in the water. There’s such a balance there that we have to understand that we have to share the beach with this very important species.”